Jeff Jonas: Ingenuity, Invention and Inspiration

IBM fellow Jeff Jonas is a trailblazer in big data, having created the Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA) software, which has helped protect organizations against fraud. During a Talks at GS session, the chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics Group discusses the inspiration behind his inventions, context computing and privacy by design.

On his oft-cited claim that data ‘beats’ math: "When you’re really wishing for a much higher quality prediction, here is the interview question: go to the math team and say, ‘If we can fund you with $5 million more dollars or 10 more people, would you be able to close your error rate in half?' When they answer ‘no,’ math is not the path. It’s figuring out what other data to add. It’s about widening the observation space."